mercredi 16 janvier 2008

"Here we have another ramification of the education system. Its costs are high. Dangerously so. For in touting learning as possession, in thereby instilling intellectual property rights, there is the reinforcement of ego boundaries. Knowledge, in being pegged to the individual as gradiated value, becomes a contributing factor in social separation rather than a proof of social wealth, abundance. In the absence of equitably distributed social wealth and its concomittent reevaluation of needs, the psychic cost of relating knowledge to possession is immense: knowledge becomes a rarefied object rather than a diffuse activity, it hardens into certainties that become dogmatic thus making us reluctant to experience the emotional suppleness of not-knowing...

But perhaps the most telling ramification is that capital's benign relaunch as a 'knowledge economy' has not only effected a 'for-profit' colonisation of the education system but, by having 'knowledge' as a component in the production of value it has redrawn the question of the 'revolutionary organisation'. Whereas the left has managed to produce much knowledge and theory it has consistently failed to bind knowledge to social experience in such a way as to undermine the paradigm of the education system. Be it 'summer schools' or 'seminars' the same social relation has been replicated, a relation to knowledge as private property rather as a modulation of social experience, a glut of the sayable rather than a reach for the unsayable..."THE ASS BETWEEN TWO CHAIRS A Communique to the Copenhagen Free UniversityHoward Slaterhttp://web.archive.org/web/20030715192109/copenhagenfreeuniversity.dk/ass.html